In Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger—who apparently is such a famous icon, he gets underlined in red by MS Word’s autocorrect option if you spell his name wrong. Is it because he was a politician and an actor?

Maybe. But if you misspell Clint Eastwood’s name, it doesn’t get underlined, and most people would argue that he’s a much better actor and a better politician.

Proof that there is often no justice in the universe. But I digress. The whole reason I started to bring up Arnold and his movie was to say the famous quote. But I digressed before I could get to it. I mean, come on, did you even notice that the first sentence wasn’t actually a sentence? It’s like when you try to explain something when you’re half asleep but just sort of trail off.

There I go, digressing again.

The quote is, “I’ll be back.”

My quote would be more like Randy Quaid’s in the movie, Independence Day:

“Hello boys. I’m back.”

But I’d just shorten it to “I’m back,” y’know, so nobody feels left out. What if the girls want to know I’m back as well? Not my muse, of course, but other women.

All of which can only mean that I’m here writing blogs again. And books too, but not as often as blogs. That I’ve survived my surgery and my recovery and the helpful friends and relatives who weren’t always as helpful as I would’ve liked. But even at their worst, they were much, much more helpful than my muse on her best day.

And they drank less wine.

All of them put together drank less wine.

For those of you who don’t know, I had a birth defect in my heart that was discovered by accident and required surgery or I would’ve died.

For the record, I did die for a brief period of time—that’s part of open-heart surgery. The part you never, ever want to think about until after the fact. When you’re alive again and completely recovered and wondering about that space on the tax form where it says you don’t have to file if you’re dead.

So do I have to file? Or do I at least get to pay less since I was dead during part of the taxable period? I mean it’s only fair. Why else would they write it down? From what I’ve seen, dead people don’t follow instructions very well. I know I don’t, and I was just visiting the dead thing.

Phew. Glad that’s over.

Now I believe Rod Stewart. He told me that the first blog was the hardest.

Actually what he said was, “The first cut is the deepest,” but I knew what he meant.